


Sun. Dust. Heat.

by CommanderInChief



Category: Holby City
Genre: F/F, F/M, Post - Prioritise the heart, ptsd mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-19 02:29:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7340977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommanderInChief/pseuds/CommanderInChief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She left her wedding photos behind.<br/>You don’t notice them at first. They’ve been there twenty five years, became as much of a part of the house as your ring is of you.  As her ring was of her.<br/>Evidently, some people are better at self-destruction than others.<br/>In order to shine, a star must first collapse in on itself, pulling everything in its gravity to crumble a slow, beautiful death.<br/>And Bernie Wolfe was a supernova.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sun. Dust. Heat.

You’ll be sat on the sofa or halfway to work or making a patient’s heart beat in your hand and it’ll come back to you in a wave that drags you under.  

Like now.

The duvet is too warm and the clock too loud and the night too thick. The hot night sweat sticks like a second skin. The pillow still smells of her.  You know you should be used to this by now. The dreams are hardly new.

The first had been Iraq.

Sun. Dust. Heat. She’s younger, in your dream, the weight hanging under her eyes is a paler shade of purple, it’ll be another six months before she’s in the explosion that leaves shards of metal embedded in her back. And, when she throws her head back to laugh, there’s no scar just below her ear.

The identity of the person sat beside her, the one telling her jokes that make her laugh until there are tears glistening under the desert sun, is the only thing that’s changed since you dreamt them for the first time.

They’d been a man, once upon a time, the kind of army bloke that’d been playing toy soldiers since he was ten years old, making finger-guns in the playground. Born for the job. If he has a wife back home, you’ve never imagined her. It’s always just him, him and your wife as they laugh in their own private world.

Now, they’re a woman. People say that’s supposed to weaken the blow but it doesn’t. A few strands of long, dark hair fly out of the window like kite-ribbons as they drive. The, the woman’s frosted blue eyes’ll meet your wife’s and you hear her voice, from the night she came from work, poured herself a glass of whisky and calmly ruined your life.

_“If it makes any of this any easier, I did want to fall in love with you, so, so badly,”_

Then, of course, is the scream.

You’ve never actually heard Bernie scream. Even in labour, she bit down on her lip until it bled, but she never yelled.

In your dream, she’s screaming.

The air’s thick. Petrol sticks in the back of her throat. Something’s soaking through the thick combat layers. Blood or fuel. Blood and she’ll be maimed. Fuel and she’ll burn.

You watch her reach for her comrade’s hand, force her eyes down shut and, as the engine sparks, you know she’s hoping for fuel. 

You wake up. You pace around the room.

Afghanistan was always more complicated.

Sun. Dust. Heat.

Base camp. There’s a storm outside, you can hear the sand pelting the tent like pellets from a revolver. In the wind that can sculpt the desert only to throw down it’s fist like a toddler toying with clay, it might as well as be.

Bernie rolls her tounge over her front teeth and you know that it’s the sand, scorched and gritty like lumps of tarmac that catches on her taste buds.

Behind her the woman, and it is a woman this time, is still there.

Her arms, impossibly pale after six months in the desert curl around your wife’s waist. Maybe she’ll bury her face in the crook of her neck before whispering something into the skin that’s still smooth without the jagged red line ripped from ear to shoulder by a surgeon in the sand by the light of a crude, flickering bulb.

Your wife smiles but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

That’s when the woman hands, the only warmth in that God-forsaken place that doesn’t burn,  slip under the moss-green T-shit.

It usually ends there, with the woman gently laying kisses over the back of your wife’s neck, easing away the worry and wariness. You should be grateful, really, that you never see the rest but somehow, that look, eyes bright and mouth naturally curled upwards, like she’s finally come home-

It’s worse.

They say that when you love someone, you want them to be happy, no matter what. It’s bullshit. The idea of her, fast asleep in some random woman’s arms as you sit, alone, in the big empty house a million miles away, sometimes you wonder if you’re actually going insane.

It’d make two of you.

But no matter how many support websites you clear from your internet history at three in the morning, no matter how phycologists you take her to only to sit in silence, no matter how long you beg to her to tell you how to get her to let you in, the advice is always the same: space.

The bed was moved to the spare room downstairs.  When she screamed her comrade’s names in the middle of the night, you clamped your hands over your ears.

The worst thing is, that, after a while, you get used to it.

And then, just like that, she left you like a wisp of smoke.

You close your eyes. Maybe this time she’ll let you sleep.

  _Sun. Dust. Heat._

Maybe not.


End file.
